Search

Bio

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently the forthcoming You Think That’s Bad. (Knopf, March 2011.) His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program, and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen Shepard, his three children, and two beagles.

If you are interested in contacting Jim Shepard, please feel free to send a note to jimshepardfan(a)gmail.com. We will be happy to forward correspondence to the author.

Share this:

Like this:

10 Responses to “Bio”

I was looking for some way to contact you to tell you I liked your story in the Summer 2009 Tin House. As someone who abandoned a PhD in mathematics, I can see that fiction explores only a limited area of human interest, and all too often regards anything outside of “relationships” with suspicion. Your story doesn’t disparage the scientific passion. Love the ending “that saving thing … that something that right now is beyond our ability to even imagine.”

Oh my freakin’ God! My fingers did the walking through the internet and I happened upon a story by Jim Shepard..something about men doing crazy things. And, oh my freakin’ God! It was hilarious. It’s like the kid down the street is writing to remind me of my misspent youth except the kid down the street was nearly illiterate and JS is a fantastic writer!

Not just a writer, but a talented speaker! He blew us all away at the Steamboat Springs Literary Sojourn! Thought-provoking, moving and funny as hell. If you have an authors’ or writers’ event. Here’s your man. Unbelievable!

[…] author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Swamplandia!; Amy Waldman, author of The Submission; and Jim Shepard, author of Project X. This summer, we will also be working with Meg Wolitzer, author of The […]

[…] Jim Shepard said that the pleasure of research can help your writing to be creation as play. “A writer’s job is to take the world personally. Read about things because your emotions have been engaged. Watch how you react. Stories that stay with us are important. The situation is best described as Venn diagram: one sphere is the experience of the subject of your research, the other sphere is the experience of writer. The little sliver of overlap in emotions, aspirations, the connection allows everything else to be accurate at least in imagination. Research helps uncover shared emotional genealogy, while distancing. Such distancing seems to enable a new and unexpected version of emotional honesty and intimacy to be generated in the work.” He ended with a quote of Oscar Wilde- “Man is least himself when he talks in his own persona, give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” […]

Reviews

“With a near spooky sense of empathy and a wit that finds its mark like lightning, the stories in Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway transport readers light-years beyond what they think they know of the world.”